After Wuthering Heights became one of the biggest 2026 movie releases and available to watch on streaming, it’s interesting to know more about the behind-the-scenes of it all. In an interview with Refinery29, Robbie said there was one scene when she and Elordi knew they “got it” as an on-screen couple:There were a couple of moments. Even on day one. [We shot] the first scene in the movie where Cathy flings open the bed hangings, and [Heathcliff is] lying in bed. And then we ended up cutting this bit but I walked up over him, and then crouch down and got like this close to his face and told him to, ‘get up, we've got neighbors,’ or whatever it was.What a wild, fun fact! I would think they’d want the moment the Wuthering Heights co-stars really clicked on set to be kept in the movie, but then again, part of what makes this film good is all the yearning. As Robbie explained:And we cut that bit because the proximity is something we wanted to save. But, I mean, that was day one, and even then, everyone was kind of like, ‘Whoa.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, I think this movie's gonna work.’ Also just because she's throwing something at him, and he's throwing it back, and he's like, ‘What?’ There was already an intensity between them that I think we could build on from that point.Oh, but now I want to see this scene! I could totally see these two characters getting too close for comfort while in their shared home without even realizing it, since they grew up together, and then kind of pulling back in more public-facing moments. That being said, I totally trust that if that wasn’t the right move for those characters, it wasn’t right for the movie either. What a good feeling that must have been, though.When CinemaBlend had the chance to speak to writer/director Fennell, we asked her why it takes so long for the pair to kiss, and she said it was important that she make it “frustrating” for the audience to see these two share scenes but not get intimate yet because “the wait is the fun.” And during our chat with Robbie and Elordi, they told us they think Heathcliff and Cathy fell in love in their very first scene together when they were kidsWhile it’s easy as an audience member to yell at the TV screen, “just kiss!” in the context of the story – which isn’t really supposed to be an epic romance – they are from two different class systems, and it was considered wrong for them to decide to be a couple or fraternize before marriage. Ultimately, while we yearn for these two, they have an incredibly tragic story. But it’s entertaining nonetheless! (Sarah El-Mahmoud)
Hindley Whips Heathcliff- ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Andrea Arnold, 2011)Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of literature that has never gotten the adaptation that it deserves; while this is in part due to the fact that almost none of the film versions bothered to include the second half of the novel, they’ve also avoided the racial subtext that is critical to understanding the intentions that Emily Bronte had. Andrea Arnold was bold enough to approach these themes by casting a mixed-race actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff, and showing how he is harassed and insulted with racial epithets.The strongest scene in the film involves Heathcliff being whipped by Hindley (Lee Shaw), Catherin’s (Kaya Scodelario) older brother. Hollywood has clearly decided to treat Wuthering Heights as a romantic epic (which it isn’t), and have whitewashed and streamlined subsequent adaptations; Emerald Fennell’s film doesn’t just ignore the racial commentary, but doesn’t even include Hindley as a character/ (Liam Gaughan)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëWritten in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell, this novel follows a fiercely independent orphan who refuses to let a restrictive Victorian world break her. After surviving a cruel childhood and a harsh boarding school, Jane takes a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall. That's where she meets her brooding employer, Mr. Rochester. Their emotional connection is incredibly deep, but it gets completely derailed by hidden family truths and intense societal pressures.I know it sounds weird to call a classic gothic tale cozy, but watching Jane fight for her personal freedom and moral clarity while falling deeply in love is deeply satisfying.Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëThe Brontë sisters were having an absolute moment in 1847, because that was the exact same year Emily published her only novel under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. This book trades the polite ballrooms for the wild, windy English moors, delivering a story built on raw passion, class divides, and relentless retribution.The central relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and the brooding Heathcliff is famously messy, showing just how destructive love can become when social structures tear people apart. Honest take: it's definitely darker than a standard ballroom romance, but the sheer emotional intensity will completely pull you under. (Jesús López)
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‘Between her and the world’: Legacies, Interpretations, Adaptations
pp 97-99 Author: O'Callaghan, Dr. Claire
Research Articles
No Atom Rendered Void: The Aerial and Alchemical Enchantment of Wuthering Heights
pp. 100-117 Author: Duell, Meg
Abstract:
This article maps how elemental and meteorological metaphysics function in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), arguing that the novel’s complex recursive structure is facilitated through an alchemical process by which the collision of air and materiality—the transcendent elements embodied by Catherine and Heathcliff—activates psychic, spatial, mortal and temporal ‘wandering’. These points of elemental friction, defined here as ‘portals of enchantment’, connect their subjects with past and future iterations of themselves and others. Additionally, it explores how the novel’s elemental ‘portals’ extend beyond spatial thresholds into aerial and avian touchstones, allowing Brontë to infuse the novel with folkloric subtext..
This Rustic Muse: Developing a Political Voice in the Poetry of Patrick Brontë
pp. 118-134 Author: Avery, Simon
Abstract:
This article examines a range of the Reverend Patrick Brontë’s poetry—a much neglected body of work in Brontë criticism—and argues that it was here that Brontë was able to develop a political voice and a sense of literature as a vehicle for political exploration and debate. In considering Brontë’s two collections, Cottage Poems (1811) and The Rural Minstrel (1813), in the contexts of war abroad and industrial, economic and social unrest at home, this article explores what the poetry tells us about Brontë’s political thinking, his relationship with political structures and hierarchies, and his anxieties about political cohesion and security. What emerges is a poet whose work, written under the guise of his ‘rustic muse’, offers fascinating interventions into contemporaneous political debates regarding poverty, industrialisation, the city, community, the place of religion in society, nation-state formation and the nature of liberty and equality more generally.
Reading Jane Eyre as a Hagiographic Romance
pp. 28-43 Author: Schiavone, Matteo
Abstract:
This article uses queer medievalism as a critical method to interpret Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), reading it as a hagiographic romance, a hybrid text that blurs clear-cut generic boundaries. As the fictionalised autobiography of a character who finds the strength of self-belief through mystical experiences and the Christian doctrine of endurance, the narrative is akin to medieval hagiographic and visionary literature, which the comparison with The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1430s) demonstrates. At the same time, however, similar to Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, it follows the pattern of a chivalric quest romance, as Jane physically moves outwards and goes through several stages of development before being ready to marry Mr Rochester. Ultimately, queered genres create a space where Jane can develop a queer gender identity beyond stifling societal expectations.‘To give the passage quite a contrary turn’: Female Religious Authority and Subversive Hermeneutics in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
pp. 132-152 Author: Wiegand, Holly
Abstract:
This article argues for a reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) as a historiography of women’s challenges to androcentric Anglican structures of authority and measures of biblical interpretation. Shirley stages the possibility and precarity of women’s public religious authority amid socio-religious discourses, underscoring the relationship between Shirley and Caroline as a space for proto-feminist theological and interpretive revisions. Attending to Brontë’s heroine’s push against religious exclusivism foregrounds Caroline’s often-overlooked hermeneutic turns in her dispute with mill overseer Joe Scott, Brontë’s mouthpiece for inherited anti-woman Anglican interpretations. This article contends that class and gender inflect the act and reception of biblical interpretation for Brontë, playing out historical debates about women’s preaching and discussions about working-class Dissenting groups that supported women’s ministries, such as Methodism. It nuances Brontë’s views on the role of women in religion as she too is pulled between traditional dogma and radical woman-centred hermeneutics along class lines.‘Are you not a little severe?’: Lucy’s Wit in Her Narrative Voice in Villette
pp. 153-166 Author: Zhang, Zhiying
Abstract:
This article provides a new perspective on Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), analysing the function of wit through the lens of psychoanalytic and comic theories. Primarily based on Freud’s theory of wit, the analysis examines various wit-making techniques, exploring how Lucy employs these methods as a means of self-expression and critique. The use of wit breaks the serious narrative tone, creating a comic effect that allows readers to enjoy the story and empathise with Lucy’s painful experiences. It also allows Lucy to release her suppressed emotional pain and struggles within her narrative. By demonstrating how wit is integral to Lucy’s journey of self-discovery and self-expression, this article contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation about comic elements in Brontë’s writing.Heathcliff, Harry and Hardin: After as a New Layer to Wuthering Heights
pp. 167-183 Author: de Beus, Emma
Abstract:
This article considers Anna Todd’s After series (2013–2015) as a new adaptive layer to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). It explores the relationship between the two works by considering the adaptive history and context of Wuthering Heights before moving onto an analysis of After, examining its multiple points of origin. The analysis includes fanfiction, the boy band One Direction and other influences on After, both classical and contemporary. The article then undertakes close readings of Wuthering Heights and After to establish clear points of connection and overarching parallels, arguing that a reading of After exposes it as a hitherto unrecognised adaptation of Wuthering Heights. By shedding light on this relationship, it is possible to better understand how Emily Brontë’s novel has found an increasingly varied afterlife in the twenty-first century—one that both speaks to the contemporary climate and reflects new understandings of the novel itself.Book ReviewsA Brontë Reading List: 2023
pp. 184-195 Reviewed by Pearson, Sara L. & Cook, Peter
Abstract:
This reading list is an annotated bibliography of scholarly and critical work on the Brontës published in 2023. We have attempted to compile a comprehensive list of resources by consulting the MLA International Bibliography, Academic Search Complete, and the Brontë Blog (http://bronteblog.blogspot.com). Book chapters and scholarly articles on the Brontës are included except those articles published in Brontë Studies. Entire books on the Brontës are in the reviews section of this journal. The author’s initials in brackets are provided after each annotation.
The Rise of Celebrity Authorship: Nineteenth-Century Print Culture and Antislavery
pp. 195-198 Reviewed by Ayrton, Tricia
Brontë Women’s Writing Festival, 26–28 September 2025
pp. 198-200 Reviewed by Dawn Gant, Rose
A Vain Talent? The Question of Female Artistry in the Life and Work of Anne Brontë
pp. 200-202 Reviewed by Sanders, Valerie
Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel. Injured Minds, Ruined Lives
pp. 202-204 Reviewed by Seijo-Richart, María
The Banagher Brontë Group Festival, Ireland, 15–18 August 2025
pp. 205-207 Reviewed by Wilcock, Joanne
AnnouncementBrontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize 2026
pp. 208-209 by O'Callagahn, Claire
The mounting number of biographies of Emily is a testament to her elusiveness. Like a moth, she has been caught, chloroformed and staked onto the page many times over, but always with a new label. First, she was a genius recluse, then a wild spirit, and more recently an agoraphobic anorexic. But as Emily herself put it, ‘Vain are the thousand creeds’, ‘worthless as withered weeds’: she is not a woman who stays pinned for long. It is refreshing, therefore, that in Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë, she has dispensed with these deadening labels, with what she calls the ‘twentieth and twenty-first-century ideas and identities [that] don’t import easily into the past’. Instead, she sets out simply to render the ‘texture’ of Emily’s days, ‘to ponder what she wore, saw, heard, smelled, and felt along her skin’.This tactile approach, a method Lutz developed in her earlier book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, is employed to great effect. The Haworth Parsonage, with its graveside aspect, rears up darkly before our eyes, and the smell of its peat fires, of the various dogs and cats, of tallow candles and pungent bedpans wafts out from the page. With only four rooms, it was a crowded home for its many inhabitants, but when we learn that every member of the family aspired to be a writer, the space feels smaller still. What could be seen represented only a sliver of the bustling reality of this house, in which whole universes were dreamt up by children who found as much freedom in them as they did on the wild Yorkshire moors. Goethe wrote that ‘talents are best nurtured in solitude’, but it was among the chiming clocks and creaking floorboards of this cramped and dimly lit parsonage that three great writers were born.Given that creativity in the Brontë family was always a collaborative affair, no biography of Emily could consider her in isolation from her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, or from her wayward brother, Branwell. Even the ghosts of her mother and her two older sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, were ever present – their successive burials in the family vault having had a profound effect on the minds of the surviving children. Emily was not, then, as Lutz explains, the isolated genius of the Brontë myth but connected, as though by a series of ‘underground rivers’, to a shared familial source. Lutz is particularly good at setting out the various components of this spring of intellectual and creative life: Blackwood’s Magazine with its dungeon tales, Irish folk stories, the well-stocked library at Ponden House with its pornographic volumes, copies of Byron, of de Sade, of Virgil, of Horace, books on geometry, and a well-thumbed History of British Birds representing only a fraction of their shared reading. Like Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen before them, George Eliot and, later, Virginia Woolf, the Brontë sisters had the run of their father’s library but with very little guidance. It was in this permissive atmosphere, and out of the tomes of a patriarchal culture, that they would make something entirely their own.While Lutz is attentive to this shared life, she tries not to lose sight of Emily for too long. We glimpse her ‘peripatetic creativity’ in the image of her reading while kneading dough, or writing on palm-sized pieces of paper that could be secreted away in an apron; we get a sense of her fierce stoicism from the story of the dog bite wound that she seared with a red-hot iron; from the various descriptions of her animals – including her intimidating mastiff, Keeper, and her wild falcon, Nero – we see a woman who gloried ‘in the ferociousness of nature’; and in her stream-of-consciousness-like journals and academic essays we recognise the cast of that original mind that would go on to write poetry like ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, and create the dark, primordial world of Wuthering Heights.But these are only glimpses, occasional flashes of illumination in a biography that otherwise contains a large amount of speculative padding. Few paragraphs go by that don’t pose unanswerable questions (‘Was Emily a whistler?’, ‘did she make herself sick, perhaps by not eating?’), and the phrase ‘she may have’ is used as reflexively as a full stop. Large swathes of conjecture about what Emily might have seen or done (often based on Charlotte’s experiences) serve as descriptive stepping stones when the facts are too thin on the ground. And a lengthy plot summary of Wuthering Heights reads like a narrative sleight of hand, meant to distract us from the fact that, with no original manuscript, we will never know how it was written. Obscured by a blizzard of unanswered questions and hypothetical experiences, Emily appears just as she did in her self-portraits: with her back to us, a subject who does not want to be known.Quoting Julian Barnes, Lutz prefaces This Dark Night by asserting that all biography is ‘a collection of holes tied together with a string’, and that ‘with Emily Brontë this is doubly true’. However, whether a biographer succeeds depends entirely on how she chooses to bridge the gaps. Were it only that Lutz relied too heavily on conjecture about what Emily saw or felt, it would merely be a frustrating book; but because her speculation extends to how Emily washed and with what material she managed her menstruation, it is a fundamentally flawed one. Never mind that no biographer of a male author would think to ask how he trimmed his nasal hair or applied his haemorrhoid cream, Lutz seems to have forgotten that her subject is the sublime poet who wrote: ‘I am happiest when most away / I can bear my soul from its home of clay’. She can look for Emily in her slop pails as much as she likes. She will not find her there.Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights’, but she could equally have written that there was no ‘I’ in Emily Brontë. Like the bluebell, which Emily called a sacred watcher, she observed the world unhindered by the blot of the self – saw it as if from the falcon’s untethered eye, as if from some far-flung perch in the boundless universe.It is no wonder she remains so elusive. (Charlotte Stroud)
With its plethora of independent stores and coffee shops, walking up the village’s Main Street towards the Bronte Parsonage in 2026 is, of course, a very different experience to how it would have been when those three writerly sisters called it home.But now the village has been faithfully recreated as it would have been in the 1840s - in miniature.Paul Crossley is a volunteer at the Parsonage, and his impressive diorama, some three years in the making, merges his two passions: model making and the history of the Bronte family.A fan since being mesmerised by The Brontës of Haworth TV series in 1973, he has a particular interest in Branwell Bronte, who struggled with addiction.“I was reading one of Ann Dinsdale’s fabulous books about the Brontës. She’s the curator of the Parsonage and in the book was a map of how the street would have looked in the 1840s,” Mr Crossley explained.“And it got me to thinking, what if I could make a model of that? I’ve been doing model making for 60 years now and it’s almost a kind of illness.”Using a scale of 2mm to a foot, Paul recreated the maps on his kitchen floor, sellotaping A4 pieces of paper together to work out the exact layout of his planned village.“Lots of the buildings described have since been demolished,” he explained “So I had to use my imagination - I see myself as a bit of a frustrated architect.”The Parsonage, the Sunday School and Haworth’s Church tower are all recognisable in Paul’s diorama, although he had to do some digging to ensure accuracy, particularly in the case of the church, which was partially rebuilt in the 1870s.“I decided I was going to base the diorama in the year 1845, which was a milestone year in the Brontë saga. Patrick [the writers’ vicar father] had got himself a new curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who would go on to become Charlotte’s husband,” he said.“It was also the year Anne resigned her job, Branwell got sacked and Charlotte discovered Emily’s poetry.”Paul’s commitment to accuracy even stretched as far as ensuring replicas of gravestones were in keeping with the year he chose.He brought his diorama to the Parsonage for a short display, where he was told by one staff member that she’d “never been able to visualise Victorian Haworth, but now she saw it in an instant.”A spokesperson for the Brontë Parsonage said: “Paul has been a dedicated and valued volunteer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for many years. We really admire the time and skill which he has put into this remarkable model, and we're all delighted that he's receiving recognition for his work.” (Victoria Finan)
Jackie was nominated because of her long-standing love of classic literature and old films, as well as a dream she had held for years of visiting Haworth, where Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë lived.In her nomination, Rosemary explained how much the trip would mean.She wrote: “Jackie has never been to Haworth and would dearly love to see where the Brontë sisters lived and the surrounding countryside which inspired their novels.“Jackie does not get out and about very much, and this experience would mean so much to her, and would be something she would remember and talk about for the rest of her life.”When Jackie learned she had been selected, Rosemary said she was “beaming” as she began planning what souvenirs she might bring back from the trip.The day was made possible by Marcus Edwards, a personal travel consultant and long-time supporter of Making Space, who volunteered to organise the visit and cover all associated costs for Jackie and Rosemary.Marcus said: “I am so happy to be able to support the work that Making Space does in the community to improve the lives of those who need a friendly face, a helping hand or some much-needed company and kindness.“I was really touched by this lady’s story and wanted to provide an experience that would make her smile, provide an opportunity for a break and for her to make some happy memories in a place she really wanted to visit.”During the day, Jackie explored the famous cobbled streets of Haworth, visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum and enjoyed lunch in one of the village’s cafés before travelling to nearby Thornton to learn more about the Brontë family’s early life.Reflecting on the experience, Jackie said: “I enjoyed every part of the day.“The Brontë Parsonage was wonderful, and I loved listening to the guide at the museum in Thornton.“I especially loved the Old Curiosity Shop. It looked like something from an old movie with chandeliers, beautiful mirrors and all the herbal soaps, lotions and potions. I absolutely adored it.“Thank you for everything. It was a very special day that I will always remember.”Rosemary added: “Jackie is a very thoughtful and reserved person, but it was clear how much the experience meant to her.“She kept saying how much she had enjoyed the day and really took everything in."It was wonderful to see her experience something she had wanted to do for such a long time.” (Safiyyah Tayyeb)
Brontë Event Space in the Old School RoomSat 30 May, 10:00am
Join us for a relaxing day of meditation, yoga and creativity as we welcome back Emma Conally-Barklem to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Emma is an author, poet and yoga teacher based in Yorkshire. She has taught yoga for fourteen years both home and away. Her classes are creative, fun and led with kindness offering options for everybody who wishes to practice.
Time Activity 10:00–11:00 Welcome / Intros / Grounding Brontë Meditation — 'Taking Flight' yoga session (suitable for all, including complete beginners!) in Parson's Field (weather permitting or in the BPM learning space) 11:00–12:00 Talk on writing The High Flight: 50 Poems Inspired by Emily Brontë's Hawk, Brontë treasures and the Diary Papers — including author Q&A 12:00–13:00 Group lunch at Cobbles & Clay, or bring your own packed lunch 13:00–14:15 Writing Narrative Voice workshop 14:15–14:45 'Nesting' restorative yoga session 14:45–15:00 Further resources & farewells
As a filmmaker and historian, I’m fascinated by the ways in which cinema has been used as a propaganda tool. I thought about this when Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights came out, and even before I had seen it I sensed there was something else happening, from the clips shared on social media to the promotional images of pale-skinned Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi striking a pose reminiscent of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. I kept thinking about what the appeal of that cinematic past was, and how it found an audience in contemporary culture. Surely there’d been enough adaptations of this book to last us an eternity.I’m familiar with Fennell’s work and her background as a former actor from an upper-middle-class family (her family used to holiday with Andrew Lloyd Webber), who has successfully moved into filmmaking. I took this context into account when watching her interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel. Despite its box office success on release earlier this year, it has been widely panned by critics for various reasons, including the apparent whitewashing of Heathcliff, which distorts a core tension of what has made the book endure for so long. One Letterboxd reviewer put it bluntly: “Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her.” This film is simply erotica dressed up as a love story.In 1975, Susan Sontag wrote “Fascinating Fascism”, an essay in which she took aim at silent-film-actor-turned-filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, arguing that, in the making of Nazi propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will, she exploited the tools of cinema to seduce the viewer. “Fascinating Fascism” covers other Riefenstahl works, including the photography book The Last of the Nuba, which clearly wasn’t state-sponsored propaganda, but was, Sontag argued, “continuous with her Nazi work”. What I’m drawn to is the argument about fascist aesthetics that Sontag made in relation to Riefenstahl’s films, which she describes as “epics of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission”.I kept thinking about ecstasy and submission after watching Wuthering Heights, and how captivating it is to the viewer. Sontag wrote that fascist iconography carries a seductive visual power that operates independently of ideology:In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a “spiritual” force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse.The aesthetics of power, hierarchy and the erasure of the individual, Sontag argued, can produce erotic as well as political responses, and those two responses share a common structure: beauty and domination are entangled in fascist art.Fascist aesthetics are also obsessed with race. As Sontag wrote, Riefenstahl’s Nuba portraits evoke “some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and mental, the joyful and the critical”.In Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, this choice is illustrated by the decision to change the brown ringlets of Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw to Robbie’s very blonde version on screen. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued that “blonde” has come to signify whiteness without being explicit: “We use ‘blonde’ (and if to a lesser extent ‘brunette’) to signal that someone is white without using a racialized term like ‘white’. It may also be more: a signifier of a type of white person.” [...]Nostalgia is another signifier of these politics. The choice to yet again adapt a 19th century novel that has had at least eight adaptations is a curious one. Brontë wrote the book at the end of the Industrial Revolution, a period of significant social and economic transformation. That context sits at the heart of the novel, and defanging it is telling. In 2011, another Englishwoman remade Wuthering Heights, in a film that captures the brutality of that period and the tension at the heart of the novel. In Andrea Arnold’s rendering, Catherine is a brunette, Heathcliff is Black and the Yorkshire moors are anything but sentimental.Robbie, who is also a producer on the latest incarnation, dismissed the criticism the film received, arguing at a panel event at the Sydney Opera House: “I consider audience always. I’ve never, ever been on set and thought, What are the critics going to think of this? I’m like, what’s an audience going to feel right now? What’s their emotional response going to be? I just believe you should make movies for the people who are buying the tickets to see the movies.”While I respect her honesty, I do wonder if seduction is what audiences need at this moment in history. Because what the audience is asking for, and what Fennell’s Wuthering Heights delivers with incredible visual precision, is exactly what Sontag identified half a century ago: the eroticisation of domination. The pleasure of surrender to a force larger and more overwhelming than oneself. The landscapes are cinematically breathtaking, Elordi is shirtless, Robbie gorgeous in the costumes. This is a film that is concerned with vibes and wants to seduce its audience with this imagery.Again, Sontag wrote that fascist aesthetics “flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude … Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.”While people watching films and clips on social media may not be thinking about these things, those creating them understand the power that images have in myth-making, and that they are not neutral. [...]In Fennell’s adaptation, audiences are given a visually stunning film layered with nostalgia and a sense of collective identity, all centred on a work of major cultural significance. Rather than encourage people to question the very structures Brontë was seeking to analyse in her novel, the movie brings people together to engage in the spectacle of a romance stripped of its politics. Love is an enduring narrative that many can relate to. For the film’s duration, moviegoers are seduced and don’t feel powerless at a time when the world outside is so overwhelming.Those who enjoy films such as Fennell’s (much like those readers who have made the “romantasy” genre a billion-dollar publishing industry) are not fascists, nor are they passive or unsophisticated. They are largely online, politically aware and living through a moment of profound institutional decline. The old structures of economic security, political legitimacy and faith in the future have all but failed. What capitalism is offering them is what Benjamin diagnosed: aesthetic expression in place of structural change and maintaining the status quo.Neither Fennell’s Wuthering Heights nor romantasy novels will dismantle racism or classism, or lower the price of petrol. If anything, they reinforce heteronormative gender roles and hierarchies. But they do offer audiences something politicians are incapable of: a temporary reprieve from the madness of the world for two hours or so.The fantasy of submission, whether to a lover, a racial identity, a landscape, the algorithm or even a political force, is essentially the fantasy of being relieved of one’s responsibility to the world. The audience does not want to be in control; it wants to surrender it completely. And exponents of fascist aesthetics, as Sontag argued, have always understood this with uncomfortable precision.Viewers whose algorithms are tuned to “tradwife content”, “glow up” trends and “soft life” escapism, or reading romantasy books and watching Wuthering Heights, aren’t being recruited or radicalised. They are being distracted and comforted as they live through these tumultuous times.This is what art can tell us about something it pretends to be unaware of. It is for future historians to give language to the aesthetics that will come to define the art that speaks to the politics and ideology of these times. But right now, it is worth remembering that good art reflects back our humanity, and shows us the world in its truth. (Santilla Chingaipe)
30 May 2026, 7:00 pm - 7:00 pmJardín Doña Concha la Barbera, La Vila JoiosaBrontë es el nuevo disco de este músico menorquín, una obra singular que invita a recorrer el paisaje interior y literario de las hermanas Brontë —Charlotte, Emily y Anne— a través de su poesía, transmitida mediante la música, conformando una experiencia literaria y musical –única e inolvidable.Guiem Soldevila es músico, cantante y compositor con una trayectoria consolidada en la escena catalana e internacional. Ha publicado cinco álbumes en solitario en los que combina folk y pop con arreglos que van de lo clásico a lo electrónico.Guiem Soldevila: voz, piano y guitarraPau Cardona: violoncelloClara Gorrias: voz y flautaNeus Ferri: voz y guitarraGeliah: danza y narración
On the Death of Anne BrontëBy Charlotte BrontëThere's little joy in life for me,And little terror in the grave;I 've lived the parting hour to seeOf one I would have died to save.Calmly to watch the failing breath,Wishing each sigh might be the last;Longing to see the shade of deathO'er those belovèd features cast.The cloud, the stillness that must partThe darling of my life from me;And then to thank God from my heart,To thank Him well and fervently;Although I knew that we had lostThe hope and glory of our life;And now, benighted, tempest-tossed,Must bear alone the weary strife.
A Charlotte Brontë biography is tipped for a prestigious international book award.The debut book by Graham Watson, titled The Invention of Charlotte Brontë, was shortlisted from more than 200 international titles.It is among only two UK nominees for the Plutarch Award, which recognises the best English-language biography of the past year.The award is judged by a panel of historians and biographers in the Biographers International Organisation.The book, which focuses on the last five years of Charlotte Brontë's life and the first Brontë biography, Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, has also been named a Book of the Year by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.The biography has received high praise from reviews across the USA and was awarded the coveted Kirkus Reviews star for excellence. The New York Review of Books described the biography as "immersive", whilst the Wall Street Journal called it "a gripping testimony into the twists and turns, revelations and silences, and endless revisions by which literary legends endure".The Plutarch Award winner will be announced at the Biographers International Conference in New York City on May 29.Graham Watson said: "My book is the result of a life-long passion I’ve had for the Brontës and Yorkshire."Being nominated for such a prestigious award is an incredible honour." (Harry Williams)
Classic literary heroines are having a moment. With Margot Robbie starring as Cathy in February’s much-talked-about Wuthering Heights adaptation, Emma Corrin taking on the role of Lizzie Bennett in Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice series, Daisy Edgar-Jones headlining a new Sense and Sensibility flick out this fall, and Aimee Lou Wood starring as Jane Eyre in a television adaptation of the novel, the classics — particularly those written by women — are no longer solely the domain of high school English syllabuses and libraries. Even the hosts of the New York Times podcast The Book Review declared their resolution to read more classics this year, rather than dedicating their reading time to new releases. [...]Hot take? The popularity of romantasy books — set in a fantastical world, where a love story is central to the plot — including such blockbusters as Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses and Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing, has something to do with it. It might seem like the two genres couldn’t be more different, but romantasy has trained us, for one, to root for the morally gray hero. In the classics, that might look like Heathcliff imprisoning a young woman in his home in a fit of selfish passion. What’s more, Wuthering Heights is the epitome of a story centered around the fated mates trope, where two people are destined to be together because of a bond that defies even the finality of death, a trope revitalized by the romantasy genre. [...]In The Chateau on Sunset, readers can live vicariously through Aria, the Jane Eyre character, who sets fire to the Hollywood casting couch, igniting an inferno that burns down all Weinstein-like men in its path. If only!Romantasy novels have reminded us how much we love fierce heroines. Yes, there are strong women to be found in other genres, but fierceness is different — fierceness is strength buttressed by wild fury, and it’s almost compulsory in the romantic-fantasy mash-ups crafted by the likes of Maas and Yarros. The women in both Austen’s and the Brontë sisters’ classic novels don’t swoop into battle on the back of a dragon with a knife in hand as they do in Yarros’s stories; instead, they use their ferocious voices when it matters most. Who can forget Lizzie Bennett telling Darcy that he’s the “last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry”? Who didn’t cheer aloud at the bravery it took for her to do that at a time when women were supposed to just nod and say yes?And what about poor, penniless Jane Eyre, in an era when feminism was at least a century away from gaining any traction, declaring to Rochester that she was his equal, that “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me”? Who didn’t love the unapologetic, almost relentless, ambition of Kat Shaw in Fargo’s novel The Favorites? Haven’t we all wanted to declare our independence or our dislike of a man in our past, or to chase after what we desire without being made to feel unwomanly?All these books could only have been written by women because only a woman can understand the fierce desire in our hearts to speak up, to take action, to stop apologizing. The power in these novels and screen adaptations is all woman, and we’re here for it.So, for those who think the resurgence in interest in the classics is simply because, in their known plotlines and characters, we find comfort and familiarity, I say: that’s not the whole story. These new adaptations offer us access to fantasy, and who doesn’t want to escape from this world and into another realm from time to time? They remind us to speak out. And they also show us that we can dream and we can hope — and, more importantly, if we use our own ferocious voices, we have the power to make our dreams and our hopes come true.
With all that said, it’s hard to imagine an easier ‘yes’ than when Willis was approached to complete a trilogy of Fennell collaborations for one of 2026’s biggest films thus far, Wuthering Heights. It sees him scoring another Elordi performance, who takes on the timeless Heathcliff character from the beloved Emily Brontë novel, with extra star power coming from Margot Robbie.Little surprise that Willis says, “I was so thrilled to come back. Emerald was gracious that she wanted to bring a lot of the team from Saltburn back. Margot Robbie had been a producer on Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, but this time, her coming to star in it was really exciting. I was determined to go to the Wuthering Heights set to start that creative process and get an eye for what Emerald was thinking. I went over when they were filming the downstairs scenes for Thrushcross Grange. Really, it was the sorrow and the sadness that the early conversations about the music wanted to capture. The kissing montage sequence is absolutely gorgeous; the first version was about six or seven minutes long.”As with Saltburn, Willis went for a very elegant, classical sound in this film that also has a fragile sheen of opulence, with the true intent being on the darkness and emotional toil bubbling beneath it. One of his standout cues is Isabella’s Dollhouse, in which he uses a felted piano that sounds almost like a toy, amidst gorgeous swells of flutes, harp, and strings.“You could almost say it’s a kind of prepared piano, because we would put different things into it to change the tone. Gavin Greenaway came and played that for us. We also use that same sound in the more emotional piano cues, almost like a folk piano, because you’re muting the typical resonances you might hear in a modern upright. It gives it some history, some character, and some age. It takes out the clean part and gives it that folk element. The doll’s house is how Cathy wants to be seen; all dressed up with frills and lace. But tracks like Again and Again, You’re Not Enough for Her, and Be With Me Always have that folk piano tune that represents Cathy’s true heart and her soul.”Music formed a significant part of the film’s marketing campaign; as well as Willis writing the full orchestral score, a certain person behind the Brat Summer phenomenon also released a new album of songs for, and inspired by, the movie. Charli XCX played a key part in the hype machine, releasing the first single House featuring John Cale of the Velvet Underground, ahead of Wuthering Heights hitting cinemas. The film’s main trailer prominently used the ‘Fall in love again and again’ refrain from Everything is romantic, one of many behemoth tracks from her ultra-successful record Brat.“Charli made an incredible album for this film as a companion experience. I’ve loved her music as long as I’ve known about it, and I really think this is her most interesting work. Her producer, Finn Keane, did a great job. What Finn and I both latched onto early on was the relationship of placing strings near the bridge — sul ponticello. You get this overtone that lives in a sweet spot between being dark and ethereal. It’s both enticing and a little bleak. Especially for Cathy and Heathcliff, that’s what their relationship is: is it desperately sad, or is it actually beautiful? That was where Emerald wanted to live for a lot of the music, and it became the bridge between the Charli album and the score.”As he travelled between the Yorkshire Dales filming locations and back to London to work, Willis curated a minimalist set-up with the power to create a film score on the go. He says, “I was able to work on this film with one rig that I could take back and forth to London and have in the edit, thanks to the power of the new chips in the MacBook Pro. I use Vienna Ensemble Pro, Logic, and a lot of Cinematic Studio Strings. I also use Spitfire libraries and the Una Corda sample from Native Instruments, which was useful for the original version of the music box piano. I loved working with the LCO (London Contemporary Orchestra) in London and the incredible team at AIR Studios. While I have a lot of tools to help me write, the score itself really comes to life in the final chapter when we go into the recording sessions.“It’s a nerve-wracking thing because you’ve been living with this sample-based music, and then you replace 98 per cent of it sonically in a single week. I get very involved with that process. Emerald and I chose the takes in the recording together. I’d play her an edit of the recording before we mix it so that she’s on board and feels it captures the way she felt during the recording session. It takes a lot of people to put these scores together; it really is a huge job.” (Adam Protz)
The Coquette’s Prison: Rosalie Murray And The Failure Of High-society Marriage As A Path To Autonomyby Donny Syofyan, Program Studi Sastra Inggris, Universitas AndalasJurnal Ceteris Paribus, 5(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.25077/jcp.v5i1.60Research on women's agency in Victorian literature typically focuses on the marginalized figure of the governess. At the same time, the upper-class coquette—who appears to wield power—remains overlooked in critical readings as a victim of systemic oppression. This research examines the coquette’s prison in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, specifically analyzing how Rosalie Murray’s pursuit of high-society marriage serves as a mechanism of self-erasure rather than a path to autonomy. The study employs a qualitative approach rooted in feminist literary criticism and historical realism. The data consist of textual evidence from the novel, analyzed through close reading and character-comparative analysis. The research evaluates the transition from pre-marital performative power to post-marital domestic entrapment. The results indicate that Rosalie’s flirtatious artillery provides only a temporary and illusory agency. Upon marrying Sir Thomas Ashby for rank and wealth, she experiences a catastrophic loss of freedom, becoming a prisoner and a slave within the physical and psychological enclosures of Ashby Park. The research concludes that Victorian high-society marriage, when divorced from moral compatibility, leads to psychological petrifaction. Further studies are recommended to employ a digital humanities approach to map motifs of spatial and psychological confinement across the broader canon of the Brontës and to identify systemic patterns of gender inequality.
Kinship is likewise revealed in other documents on view: A letter from Charlotte Brontë to her most frequent correspondent, Ellen Nussey, demonstrates their bond. . . (Hannah Benson)
One of my favorite episodes is The Other Brontë Girl: Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall from February 24, 2025. The hosts tell us: "With all the fuss and fanfare around Wuthering Heights, we’re worried Emily Bronte is getting more than her fair share of attention. So today we shift the SLOB-light to her younger sister Anne, author of the remarkable The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848. Anne wrote it in a whirlwind after the successes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, determined to prove herself a Bronte in talent and spirit.The hosts continue: "And though Anne is now the least celebrated of the Brontë trio, Tenant at the time of its publication, it was considered the most shocking in the Brontë collective oeuvre. Anne had fearlessly pulled back the veil on marital infidelity, domestic violence, alcoholism, and the systemic torments of Victorian masculinity and marriage laws." (Frank Racioppi)
In the latest Hollywood adaptation of “‘Wuthering Heights,’” Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are tortured soulmates, the moors are wide and barren, everyone is brooding, and the story is reduced to sex, violence, and revenge. The critical points about class, racial otherness, inheritance, and generational destruction Emily Brontë made in her 1847 novel are pushed aside to create a gothic romance film for a date night.Lately, Hollywood’s approach to classic literature feels less like reinterpretation and more like reduction. From “‘Wuthering Heights’” to “Frankenstein” to “Animal Farm,” film studios keep coming back to classic literature, and in theory, this should be a good thing. Adaptations can reintroduce older pieces of literature to new audiences and expand on the themes that remain prevalent in society today.But this doesn’t always seem to work in practice. Hollywood’s problem is using the ethos of classic literature without doing the work of actually engaging with its content. Adaptations don’t need to transcribe the original text, but they do need to understand what the original source material is actually doing to faithfully interpret it. [...]In recent adaptations, studios rely too much on the marketability of recognizable names, characters, and titles. Instead of considering why the book is important, producers often focus on the parts of the book that can sell the fastest, which is how a complicated, nuanced novel is reduced to a gothic romance with elaborate costumes.Emerald Fennell’s “‘Wuthering Heights’” demonstrates how easily this flattening can happen. Fennell described how the novel captivated her when she was 14 years old and how she wanted her adaptation to capture the “primal and sexual” feelings she had when she first read it. But when an adaptation is based on a first impression instead of a deeper reading, it runs the risk of presenting an inaccurate version of the original text.Devin Garofalo, a professor in UCSD’s literature department, explained in an interview with The Guardian that Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is not just a romance; it is about “the horror of romance.” Treating violence as passion due to a teenager’s misreading of a novel is what Brontë was critiquing in the first place. [...]In other words, bad adaptations don’t just make audiences misunderstand a book — they can make audiences misunderstand history as a whole. They offer what Garofalo called an “amnesic account of the past”: one that airbrushes historical violence from a present-day vantage point and makes the past seem distant and decorative. Classic literature matters because, as Lu explained, the past is always “infiltrating the present.” These texts help readers understand the current world by showing how language can be manipulated, how class and race shape relationships, how violence gets justified, and how these old systems of power still shape the present. When Hollywood trims these texts down to their most marketable hook, it undermines the reason why these stories mattered in the first place.Hollywood does this because these hooks are easier to sell and produce than a complicated, uncomfortable argument. Sex sells. Jacob Elordi sells. Topical references sell. But a serious critique of power, class, race, and gender? Those are often much harder to package and convince viewers to watch.And that’s where the problem becomes bigger than just the adaptation. Lu described how adaptation debates often focus too much on whether a film is a good or bad rendition of the original source. But the better question, she argues, is: “What does it say about us that this is the adaptation?”The answer is not flattering. These recent adaptations suggest that Hollywood thinks audiences want classics in their easiest, most comfortable versions: recognizable enough to market but not complicated or nuanced enough to encourage thought. They keep the title, the aesthetic, and the basic premise while watering down the harder ideas about power, class, race and violence that made these books important in the first place.When Hollywood strips that away, it isn’t keeping the classics alive: It’s just turning them into marketable content. Brontë is probably rolling over in her grave — because if this is Hollywood’s idea of preserving literature, the classics were better off on the shelf. (Anu Venkatesh)
with Dr Murray TremellenIn-person 2pm. Brontë Space at the Old School RoomFree with entry to the Museum and for residents in BD20, BD21 and BD22Online 7:30pm £6 On Zoom: a link will be sent before the eventThe Brontës are famous for their Yorkshire roots, but they were well aware of events in the wider world. In the 1820s, when they were still children, Britain went to war with the powerful Asante Empire in West Africa. In connection with our new exhibition, The Colonial Brontës, Parsonage curator Dr Murray Tremellen explores the history of the First Anglo-Asante War and shows how it became a key source of inspiration for the Brontës’ juvenile writings.Dr Murray Tremellen has been a curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum since May 2023. He previously worked as curator of social history at York Museums Trust. He co-curated this year’s temporary exhibition, The Colonial Brontës, in collaboration with principal curator Ann Dinsdale and guest curator Prof. Corinne Fowler.
In 1989, she became head of drama at Granada, where other programmes she oversaw included Jeeves and Wooster (1990-93), The Cloning of Joanna May (1992) and Maigret (1992-93). At LWT, she commissioned two literary adaptations, Jane Eyre (1997) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1998), as well as Wokenwell (1997). (Anthony Hayward)
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A paper rose handmade from the pages of Wuthering Heights.If you’re looking for a first anniversary gift (paper is traditional), a present for a book lover, or just something more meaningful than flowers that die in a week – this is it. Each Wuthering Heights rose is made from old pages of Emily Brontë’s classic novel. Often sourced from charity shops, these books, approaching their end of life are given a new lease of life and transformed into a treasured keepsake.Why choose a literary paper rose?Real roses wilt. These don’t. They’re perfect for paper anniversaries, romantic gifts for book lovers, or anyone who appreciates classic literature. Wuthering Heights is one of the great love stories – dark, passionate, unforgettable. If it’s their favourite book, this becomes personal, and you’ll become the best gift giver ever.What you get:∙ One handmade Wuthering Heights rose (bouquets are also available)∙ Stem wrapped in floral tape for an authentic look∙ Approximately 30cm tall∙ Lasts foreverEach rose is slightly different depending on which pages I use, which makes every one unique.Other custom book roses are available – want a rose from Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, or your favourite book? Just ask.Handmade in the UK. Made to order. Ships ready to gift.The head of the rose only measures approximately 8cm at its widest point (some variation will occur due to the handmade nature of this product) and approximately 5cm in height. This is then attached to a covered wire stem with a leaf that measures approximately 25cm in height meaning that the whole rose measures approximately 8cm at its widest point and approximately 30cm in height.
Fans of Outlander will recognize familiar elements immediately: a passionate romance, gothic atmosphere, and a fiercely independent heroine. Jane Eyre even contains a subtle supernatural element: Jane and Rochester’s bond, despite being at times problematic and tragic, is tightly woven by a mysterious power–typical of gothic novels–difficult to detect, but impossible to ignore.Jane’s unwavering emotional and moral equality in her relationships feels very modern and close to Claire’s worldview. Both women are passionate, loyal, steadfast in their beliefs, and possess an inner strength that makes them remarkable. If you empathize with Claire, you almost certainly will love Jane, one of literature’s great heroines. (Noelle Mazzoni)
The show is set at the world's first ever Jane Eyre Convention, where we find a group of slightly neurotic Bronte-aficinados gathered to reenact scenes from their favourite novel.As the group share their passion for all things Jane Eyre, they squabble and fight over the best bits, and conflict over authentic interpretations; also experiencing real emotions as they follow the character of Jane on her journey, including wailing running across the moors! More memorable scenes from the book are relived, as the group attempt to rescue shackled Bertha from the attic. (...)Jane Eyre Convention is performing June 9-13 at The Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham and will have another engagement from July 24-25 at the Hope Theatre, Islington. Tickets are available to purchase online from venue websites or box offices. (Marissa Faith Curley)
AnneBrontë.org posts about Anne's Last Journey to York.
Cameron Zwierlein, Chapman UniversitySpring 5-2026First Advisor: Joanna LevinSecond Advisor Lynda HallThird Advisor: Rei MagosakiAbstractThis thesis examines representations of female food refusal across Wuthering Heights, Play It As It Lays, “Los Angeles,” and The Vegetarian, arguing that restrictive food behavior extends beyond individual psychology to function as a culturally embedded form of protest. Drawing on Susan Bordo’s theoretical framework, this thesis looks at the female body as a site disciplined by patriarchal norms, where the refusal of food becomes a paradoxical act that simultaneously resists and reproduces systems of control. Through the characters of Catherine, Maria, Alice, and Yeong-hye, these texts depict food refusal as a symbolic language used in contexts where conventional forms of agency are constrained or silenced.Despite differences in historical and cultural context, these works converge in portraying anorectic behaviors as both an assertion of autonomy and an internalization of oppressive ideals surrounding femininity and control. This duality reveals the inherent contradictory nature of food refusal. It operates as a form of protest against patriarchal expectations while also enacting self-erasure. Ultimately, this thesis argues that such acts of resistance are limited in their transformative potential, as they often culminate in further alienation, exploitation, or even death. By situating these narratives within a broader cultural and theoretical context, this thesis demonstrates how female food refusal demonstrates a complex, yet ultimately unsustainable, negotiation of female identity, agency, and power.
“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.” The quote of the day Emily Brontë perfectly summarizes the significance of listening to your instincts and being faithful to yourself.The author implies that there is no point to make oneself conform to the will of others, which may prove to be exhausting and uncomfortable. (Alisha Louis)
The quote comes from the poem Stanzas (Often rebuked, yet always back returning), whose attribution to Emily Brontë is somehow controversial.
Screening towards the end of the Cannes Film Festival, the Un Certain Regard entry Victorian Psycho, directed by Zachary Wigon, is easily one of the guilty pleasures of this year’s selection. Based on the novel by Spanish author Virginia Feito, the film is a blend of classic Victorian novels, such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and murder stories tinged with deprivation, as suggested by the title, which recalls American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and its subsequent 2000 film adaptation directed by Mary Harron. (Veronica Orciari)
In conjunction with the Wesley Centre in Malton, Kemps Bookstore will welcome acclaimed authors Essie Fox and Stephanie Bramwell-Lawes for an evening of gothic fiction.Inspired by 19th-century novelists and poets, Essie is a bestselling author of gothic historical fiction and has lectured at several esteemed institutions, including the V&A Museum, the Westminster Library, and the National Gallery.Her books include a Sunday Times Book of the Month, Dangerous, which features Lord Byron as a detective in Venice, and Catherine, an intriguing retelling of Emily Brontë’s classic Wuthering Heights from Catherine’s perspective.Likewise, Stephanie is a lifelong admirer of Victorian literature, with her favourite novels, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, heavily inspiring her much-anticipated debut novel, Thornby Manor. (...)Essie and Stephanie will be in conversation at the Wesley Centre on June 5 for a quintessentially gothic evening, perfect for fans of the Brontë sisters.The event starts at 7.30 pm, and the doors and bar open at 6.45 pm. Tickets are £10 per person or £20 for a ticket and a book. (Karen Darley)
Charli XCX’s album accompanying Emerald Fennell’s take on Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a fascinating listen, capturing the gothic nature of the story but still maintaining a contemporary lens. (...)Overall, Charli XCX’s interpretation of Wuthering Heights through music is really fitting but can be listened to through modern music fans and how relationships can be turned toxic very quickly. In may ways it is a powerful listen.
'Jugada maestra': Heathcliff en el siglo XXI (:..)Y es que Beckett Redfellow, rebosante de resentimiento generacional y de clase, es la reencarnación del Heathcliff de 'Cumbres Borrascosas' para esta era. O del Conde de Montecristo para este III Milenio. En un entorno de monstruoso capitalismo. Por todo eso, algunos creemos que 'Jugada maestra' es precisamente lo que su título proclama. (Begoña Del Teso) (Translation)
'¡Átame!', la 'Cumbres borrascosas' de AlmodóvarEn 1989, Pedro Almodóvar estrenó una película que recibió 15 nominaciones al Goya y no ganó un solo cabezón. Pero el tiempo la ha acabado encumbrando como una de sus obras magistrales: ¡Átame! Protagonizada por Victoria Abril y Antonio Banderas, ¡Átame! puede verse en Netflix y Movistar Plus+. Y es el argumento audiovisual que Almodóvar podría esgrimir para que le aceptasen una adaptación de Cumbres borrascosas.Buñuel y, algo menos, Kosminsky y Fennell han subrayado la perversidad de Heathcliff, el protagonista de Cumbres borrascosas. Sin embargo, en la novela de Brontë, salvo el narrador (un hombre sin nombre que trata a Heathcliff y escucha, por parte de su criada, toda su historia) y algún personaje secundario, toda la fauna del título de Brontë es borrascosa. Empezando por Catherine, a la que se tiende a santificar en las películas o, a lo sumo, a verla como víctima de una obsesión ante el maligno Heathcliff. (Julio Mármol) (Translation)
Cathy's armpits (sic) are still discussed in many places, like Cosmopolitan, for instance. The Cinemaholic discusses how the novel features Heathcliff's race. Nothing new, really. Also in The Cinemaholic, an article about Jacob Elordi's wigs and face hair in Wuthering Heights 2026.
Renowned Brontë scholar, historian and illustrator Eleanor Houghton joins us to discuss her recently published book Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes.
Eleanor Houghton summarizes the podcast on her Instagram:
What became of Charlotte Brontë’s wedding dress?No photographs survive. No physical trace of the original gown remains. And yet, through descriptions, recollections, sketches, and a long-lost reconstruction, it becomes possible to glimpse the dress she wore in June 1854: white book muslin, softly pleated, unexpectedly romantic.It was an enormous joy to discuss this now shadowy dress and the fascinating emotional logic that lay behind Charlotte’s choice to marry in white, with the brilliant @the_art_of_dress for @dressed_podcast.Our episode aired yesterday, so do go and listen!In our lively chat, we trace Charlotte’s relationship with clothing throughout her life and think about the garments she wore as she grew, taught, travelled, wrote, became famous, loved, grieved, and eventually married.There is so much more to say about this gown than could ever fit into a reel. So, for more, listen to the podcast and read ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes’ (Bloomsbury, 2026).
There’s a chilling promise in the preface of “This Dark Night,” Deborah Lutz’s account of the life of a celebrated early-19th-century English poet and novelist. “With this biography,” writes the author, “I work to place Emily Brontë in the history of more modern ways of thinking.”The phrase “more modern ways of thinking” may curdle the blood of the reader, who may brace for Ms. Lutz to inculpate her subject in matters of race, class and gender. Happily, there’s no cause for alarm. The reader’s blood can resume its easy flow. Such elements do appear in the book, but there’s no sense that Ms. Lutz has strained to find and exploit them. Rather than offering the usual tedious politics, she gives us lavish servings of literary aesthetics. By the end, the reader understands much of what went into Brontë’s making, and leaves feeling grateful, buffeted and a little awestruck by the intense, self-contained, short-lived author of one of the world’s most esteemed novels.Had Brontë survived past 30, she might have worked yet-greater literary marvels, but as it is she left us with “Wuthering Heights,” a bravura work of melodrama published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. The novel was slow to sell and slow to find its place in the canon. Brontë was dead before it bore her name. Early reviewers, writes Ms. Lutz, found the book “too gloomy, savage, and eccentric.” She speculates that its harsh reception may have to some degree gratified its author who, after all, “did mean to write a savage, cruel, and gloomy novel.”In “This Dark Night,” Ms. Lutz, a professor literature at Pennsylvania State University, deploys flash and elegance when tracing the wellsprings of her subject’s genius to their sources. Brontë was born in 1818 into a household acquainted with grief; her mother died in 1821 and her two eldest siblings within weeks of each other in 1825. She grew up primarily in the company of her sisters (Charlotte and Anne) and brother (Branwell), with their father (Patrick), in splendid seclusion in a parsonage near England’s West Yorkshire moors.From her earliest years, Emily thrilled to the austere glories of the landscape, with its great desolate stretches of rocky turf and rushing waterways all shaped and pummeled by winds that whistled and “wuthered.” She was alive to folklore that told of fairies and elves and the lingering dead. She developed, writes Ms. Lutz, a “weird, witchy” sense of humor, doodled violent images in the margins of her books and made a specialty, in her poetry and prose, of the “nocturnal and crepuscular.”Most importantly, Brontë spent her formative years in a kind of grand literary apprenticeship. Most children toggle back and forth between reality and fantasy and leave imaginative play behind (or become incapable of engaging in it) around puberty. The Brontë siblings were able to extend their time of enchantment by staying at home, socializing with one another and committing wholly to living in realms of their own creation: Charlotte and Branwell in the fictive land of Angria, Anne and Emily in Gondal.The siblings concocted complex lineages and histories for their countries, writing Angrian and Gondalian tales and verse in tiny homemade books. Their reading, writing and collaboration went on for years. It is hard to imagine a better hothouse for growing gaudy literary flowers, and therefore perhaps no surprise that all four Brontës would be published, but still it is a wonder that from this one crowded nursery should spring not one but two of the most distinguished novels ever penned: “Wuthering Heights” and, earlier the same year, Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.”In adulthood, the need for ready money forced each of the Brontës to leave their creative idyll for a time—all of them worked as educators—before returning home. The three girls embarked on novels, writing alone during the days and meeting in the evenings to talk over points of plot and character.The turbulent Branwell was the first literary Brontë to be published (a poem, not a novel), but also the first to die: drink, despair and tuberculosis put him in a grave at 31. Emily, 13 months his junior, was soon to follow, though even as she sickened (probably also from tuberculosis), she likely continued to disappear into the parallel worlds of her imagination. In her subject’s consciousness, writes Ms. Lutz, “through the scrim of the real appeared, indistinctly, a land where people and objects could shapeshift, where dreams provided texture. Something might lie behind or deep inside the mundane; almost anything could function as an entryway to the miraculous, the sublime.”As to the elements of modern thinking, Ms. Lutz does explore Brontë’s love life. She alludes to a mysterious adolescent entanglement of which scholars know little (incredibly, for a woman who wrote so much, very little of Brontë’s correspondence is known to exist), and notes here and there the possible influence of lesbians.In another nod to modern thinking, missing almost entirely from this vivid narrative is the role of Christianity in the life of a young woman who in girlhood said her prayers, who as a teenager carefully reproduced an engraving of an ascetic saint and who would have heard church bells ringing every day of her life. Brontë was fascinated by silent crypts and tormenting passions. These are aspects of the gothic sensibility, of course; they might also, for a clergyman’s daughter, have come from a different guiding philosophy. (Meghan Cox Gurdon)
Emerald Fennell says period-realistic scene emphasising Cathy’s lack of razors was shot but did not make final cutThe Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell said it was “unfortunate” that a scene showing Margot Robbie’s hairy armpits did not make the final cut, because women in period adaptations are often shown with clean-shaven underarms.Robbie’s character, Cathy, had “extremely hairy armpits” in the 2026 adaptation of the novel, but “unfortunately the scene that we see them didn’t make it in there”, said the director.Cathy having unshaven pits “was so important to me”, she said, adding that she often wonders “where are the razors that these women are using?” when watching Jane Austen adaptations.“They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like: ‘What’s going on? It’s completely mad.’”Fennell spoke to an audience at Hay festival in Wales on Friday evening. Her sexed-up adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic novel, starring Robbie alongside Jacob Elordi, was released on Valentine’s Day this year.Fennell described it as a “sister, not a twin” of the book, saying that she “couldn’t make” the original. “It’s so brilliant,” she added.Asked about the infamous “skin room” – Cathy’s husband, Edgar Linton, gives her bedroom a bespoke design with walls that resemble her skin – Fennell joked that in marketing meetings the team considered asking Farrow & Ball to make a Cathy’s skin themed colour.They also asked Robbie to send close-up images of the underside of her wrist in order to reproduce her veins on the walls.Fennell also spoke about the much-discussed “fish scene”, in which Cathy sticks her finger into a dead fish’s mouth.“I saw a fish in aspic and I thought: ‘I want to stick my finger in its mouth.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, I think if you were trapped, and you were extremely sexually frustrated, the first thing you’d do is …’“We had all of the different fish, we had fish with lipstick on, we had real fish, fake fish, in the end that was a real fish. But poor Margot. I mean she had to do that. There were 12 of them.”On her directorial approach, Fennell said that “being embarrassing, being cringe” is a “really big thing” for her.“Especially now in our culture, we are so phobic and terrified of being cringe, or being earnest, and so we’ve got this deadening ambivalence about everything, and I feel, for me, I want to get in and go for it, and push it off a cliff.”Fennell said she is taking time off from film-making to make jigsaw puzzles, see her family, disconnect from the internet and read Sarah J Maas novels.“And I’m coming up secretly with something so depraved, so profoundly evil, that nobody’s going to make it.” (Ella Creamer)
In the era of BookTok, many fans find themselves drawn to stories fueled by yearning. Some might want to step into a romantasy, where bat-winged boys sweep their powerful protagonists off their feet, while others prefer a more real-world scenario with some sports thrown in to spice things up. So it comes as no surprise that when said readers discover the hyper romantic content of the past, they find themselves either entrenched or disappointed with the lack of fangirl appeal. Either the material doesn’t have the steamy passages found in more modern romances or there’re too many problematic elements getting in the way of diving deep into the fantasy.One such example comes in the form of Emily Brontë’s tragic soap-operatic tale, Wuthering Heights. From the highly debated depictions of its lead characters to the evolving question of whether the central romantic pair are terrible people or victims of circumstance, there’s no shortage of topics to debate within this masterpiece. But when you add the controversial filmmaking choices of writer/director Emerald Fennell (Saltburn) into a new film adaptation, along with the casting of Margot Robbie (Barbie) and Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein)? The fandom disputes get turned up to 11. Now, thanks to Warner Bros., this highly deliberated version has landed on home video. Are the hot takes surrounding it warranted? Or is it a misunderstood gem? The answer is as full of twists and turns as Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship. [...]Thankfully, Warner Bros.’s home release captures the visual splendor of Fennell’s adaptation in sparkling quality. Not only does the 4K release showcase the cinematography in all its beauty, but the sound, in particular, replicates that of its theatrical release (which works to enhance the Charli XCX’s songs as well as the Dolby Atmos version did.) Similarly brilliant are special features. From the delicious commentary by Fennell herself which dives deep into her mindset while making the film to a multitude of behind-the-scenes featurettes, it’s wonderful to see a home release befitting the efforts that went into the film, something that feels rare for most new movies getting the 4K treatment these days.Ultimately, regardless of whether you like this very different take on Emily Brontë’s classic or not, it goes without saying that Fennell’s adaptation is cinematic. Sure, it might be missing half of the story while also changing quite a number of the factors that make most readers love the original story, but there’s a degree of craft, detail, and genuine artistry found within every frame of this sumptuous romantic venture. It’s just a shame that this level of passion couldn’t have, instead, been poured into something we haven’t already seen many times over. (Dalin Rowell)
There are the faintest echoes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre in the Yorkshire Moors setting. (David Rooney)
